The Spiritual Crisis of the Bourgeois Bohemians

The New Yorker‘s George Packer can’t decide what to think about 21st-century America.

On the one hand, Packer likes developments that enhance the lifestyles of the educated upper middle class: “marriage equality, Lipitor, a black President, Google searches, airbags, novelistic TV shows, the opportunity for women to be as singlemindedly driven as their male colleagues, good coffee, safer cities, cleaner air, photographs of the kids on my phone, anti-bullying, Daniel Day Lewis, cheap communications, smoke-free airplanes, wheelchair parking, and I could go on.” On the other hand, he’s sorry that these benefits aren’t more broadly shared. Life is pretty good in brownstone Brooklyn and its spiritual counterparts. But it’s gotten harder and harder in “urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa…”

So how can this be the best of times for gays, sufferers from cardiovascular disease, African American politicians, TV fans, ambitious women, and so on, but among the worst for the urban poor, agricultural workers, and overleveraged homeowners? Packer can’t quite figure it out:

We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation.

Although his economic generalizations are accurate, Packer’s remark is historically and politically obtuse. Rather than shedding light on the profound divergence in Americans’ fortunes and expectations over the last few decades, it reflects a spiritual crisis of the BoBo elite, which is unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that its commitments to individual autonomy and expressive consumerism are incompatible with the egalitarianism that it pretends to favor.

In the first place, note Packer’s unexplained use of the first person plural. In his view, “we usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality.” This is probably true of contributors to The NewYorker. But the automatic association of “inclusiveness” with equality is a fairly recent development in American thought, and reflects the triumph of the New Left rather than any inherent affinity.

Before the 1970s, labor unions were the most effective advocates for economic equality in American life. At the same time, they were for the most part indifferent and in some cases actively hostile to the liberatory aspirations of gays, women, and blacks.

Today’s progressives usually see this hostility as an expression of bigotry, and thus miss its strategic significance. For the labor movement, workers’ collective power against employers was vastly more important than individuals’ freedom to pursue their sexual orientation or personal ambitions. The unions’ success in the postwar period is partly attributable to the subordination of all other considerations to the goals improving wages, benefits, and working conditions. For labor, in other words, equality had little to do with the number of women and blacks sitting on the management side of the table—let alone gay marriage (which AFL-CIO President George Meany mocked as early as 1972).

The transformation of equality from an economic ideal to a social principle is important for understanding what’s wrong with Packer’s second claim. In our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are far from “unrelated”. Rather, social inclusion has been used to legitimize economic inequality by means of familiar arguments about meritocracy. According to this view, it’s fine that the road from Harvard Yard to Wall Street is paved with gold, so long a few representatives of every religion, color, and sexual permutation manage to complete the journey. Superficial diversity at the top thus provides an moral alibi for the gap between the one percent and the rest.

Did it have to be this way? Packer suggests that it does not, noting that social and economic equality progressed together for a while before diverging in the ’70s. But that divergence was not simply an accident. Rather, it was a predictable result of the takeover of Democratic Party by the New Left, which was far more interested in sexual and cultural revolution than in representing unfashionably conservative workers.

Over the next few decades, erstwhile radicals learned that they could get more of what they wanted by cooperating with business than by opposing it. The New Left got affirmative action, relaxed gender norms, and good coffee, while the corporations acquired a new justification for their profits. The libertarianism adopted by many Silicon Valley types is the most rigorous theory of this fusion of inclusiveness and capitalism. But the “social liberalism, fiscal conservatism” popular on Wall Street and at elite universities is a milder and therefore more palatable version of the same idea.

More generally, it is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth. People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently. In this respect, the affirmations of choice and diversity that now characterize American culture, tend to undermine appeals to collective action or shared responsibility. If we’re all equal in our right to live own lives, why should we do much to help each other?

Over the past several years, I have posed versions of this question to a number of intelligent, well-educated progressives who are puzzled by the coincidence of increasing social inclusion and economic inequality. I’ve never yet heard a convincing answer. George Packer is right to observe that:

No iPhone app or biotech breakthrough can do anything about this disparity. It’s not a problem that the most brilliant start-up entrepreneurs are equipped to solve. It seems immune to engineering solutions, since it has coincided with a period of rapid technological change. It’s one of those big, structural problems that requires action on many fronts, from many institutions—from government at all levels, from business, from the media and universities. It needs a shift in laws, priorities, social relations, modes of production, and in the ways people think of their rights and obligations as citizens.

But I wonder if he’d actually approve of the implications of such a shift, which is more likely to take the form of déclassé populism than the manicured progressivism on offer at The New Yorker.

I’ve lived in Rockingham County, North Carolina. It is where my ancestors were born since before the Revolution. It is rural, but is too close and with too easy access to the Piedmont Triad to be a cultural backwater. More to the point, Rockingham County, like every other place in America, enjoys, for good and for evil, the same features of contemporary life George Packer lists as being available to him in Brooklyn. This is what cable TV, the World Wide Web, and personal telephone/internet portals have brought to our nation, not to mention the plethora of Congressional laws and Federal regulations. Our differences lie today not so much in where we live as in how we live. And, so , the discrepancies are more apparent to us.

Social inclusion and inequality have diverged because two separate socioeconomic processes are working at cross purposes. American society since the 1950s has made stunning progress at tearing down legal and sociological barriers for minorities–and this process has lead, arguably, to opportunity for many who were formely disenfranchised and dramatically increased the human capital available to American capitalism.

At the same time, however, technological advances in communications has spurred the growth of globalism, which has given American capitalism not only new markets to seel to but new sources of talent from across the globe to use in its later. At the same time, various forms of automation–specifically IT, robotics, more sophisticated management of the supply chain–have reduced the demand for less-skilled labor.

So while Americans have more opportunity in theory these days, we have less opportunity in fact; we are legally more equal but economically more vulnerable. And as our ruling elites continue to thrive and prosper, there is little incentive to adapt the depredations of the new global economy.

But among the worst for the urban poor, agricultural workers, and overleveraged homeowners?

When was life good for the agricultural workers? The realities of the Grapes Of Wrath was certainly true and after WW2 the realities of illegal immigrants dominated the picker jobs. Also it was conservatives (and the Japanese model) of the 70s and 80s that killed the labor union movement. Remember the Reagan and the song “Born in USA?” The more I read about the 1950s and 1960s, I believe it was because there was just a shortage of labor created by the realities of WW2 and the baby bust of the Depression. Anyway we also forget more people lived like the Kradems than Father Knows Best in the 1950s.

So what are you saying? That Jim Crow laws are necessary to make good-paying blue collar jobs available to white workers? That gay marriage and handicapped parking spots are what is inhibiting wage growth? That if we threw away our smart phones, the good-paying industrial jobs would come back? That it is all the fault of those selfish women who wanted to enter the professions instead of being full-time housewives? That every time you drink gourmet coffee, you impoverish the working class?

Look, I do agree that it was a mistake to stop worrying about economic disparity and worry exclusively about racial, ethnic and gender balance. But I don’t share your opinion that these things are incompatible. If there is a case that social inclusion and economic equality are mutually exclusive, you haven’t made it.

Tribalism is the nature of politics. Every successful political movement in the US has been a coalition of interest groups to the exclusion of others. Modern liberalism is no different: but that doesn’t mean that modern liberalism is any less pure than the New Deal or the Reagan Revolution. Political movements aren’t pure or impure, they are just coalitions put together to win elections and advance agendas. Evangelicals didn’t care that Nancy Reagan followed astrology; because the Reagans advanced their political agenda, whereas the Carters did not, in spite of their devout Baptist faith. (Clearly that’s a big part of why many view Evangelism so skeptically, but that’s the risk Evangelicals took when they decided to attach themselves to a political coalition).

Obama put together a winning coalition of socially liberal whites and minorities. This coalition desired a more left of center government and a move away from the Bush administration. That’s more or less what Obama has given them. Yes, there’s anger in the Obama coalition over drones and continuing use of the Patriot Act. But the Left can’t effectively defect from Obama over this long as the Right offers nothing substantively different. Obama knows this, which is why he can afford to do it without real electoral consequence.

As far as working class voters go, who gets to determine what constitutes a “working class” or “blue-collar” voter? 20 grand a year? 30? 40? And are these people monolithic in their beliefs and cultural habits? In the northeast, they went solidly Obama. In the South, blacks went Obama and whites went Romney. I think the voting patterns of the working class are too varied to make any broad generalizations about them.

“If we’re all equal in our right to live own lives, why should we do much to help each other?”

Precisely because we’re equal. And there are times when privacy is valuable, and times when community participation is valuable. The government shouldn’t force me to watch movies or listen to music that doesn’t appeal to me. It should force me to pay a small portion of my paycheck so that community children have decent school facilities and parks.

“I have posed versions of this question to a number of intelligent, well-educated progressives who are puzzled by the coincidence of increasing social inclusion and economic inequality.”

As a liberal (not a progressive!), I’m not puzzled by this at all. It’s got nothing to do with the take-over of the Democratic Party by the New Left. Quite the contrary: social liberalism is something that Democratic pols can offer the base to keep them just happy enough to vote Democratic, even as they sell out more and more to corporate interests.

In this sense, it’s just he flip-side of the sop of social conservatism that the corporatist Republican Party uses to buy the votes of its base. The only difference is that the Democratic Party’s social inclusiveness and responsibility agenda at least has the advantage of being on the right side of history, as against the rear-guard action against the same that is being fought by increasingly desperate social conservatives.

A few years back Roger Scruton wrote a great piece (for City Journal, IMS) about the intellectual and aestheic journey from Foucault to present. In one word? Kitch.

Brooks’s Boehemians in Paradise is kitch. A decent and competent production of the plaster saints, maybe, but still kitch. Still fake and worst of all not sinfully, mortally fake but piously and earnestly fake.

Progressives and capitalism have made the animal part of man supreme. Both have rhetorically taken from the Tao that which proscribed proper attribution sepcifically because the materialism that fed their progress and advance would then have to be examined.

Keith Joseph, Maggie’s Secretary of State for Industry, said the following at his Speech at Edgbaston:

Would it not now be better to approach the public, who know that economics is not everything, as whole men rather than economic men? Should we not deal with matters which concern the nation; respect for other people and for law, the welfare of young people, the state of family life, the moral welfare of all the people, cultural values, public-spiritedness or its lack, national defence, the tone of national life? These are at the centre of the public’s concern. The economic situation is not an independent variable; it reflects the state of political life, the degree to which people are aware of realities, and the climate of opinion. You will only have a healthy economy in a sound body politic.
[..]
And the opposite of socialist is not capitalist. Our party is older than capitalism, and wider than any class. It grew up in the first place out of concern for liberties, traditions and morals. It has evolved a good deal in the past three centuries yet it has retained its essential character; its area of concern is the whole of public life and all matters which should be of public interest down to the treatment of every man, woman and child.

The bourgeois live a conservative life because it’s the only possible life to live if you are to protecte yourself, first of all, and your children after that. There is no God who is Other -as Barth would always declare- that is guiding their healthy behavior. It is 100% pragmatic and the obvious path to success, a success of distinction or individuality, if you please.

I’m a lower-middle class girl who has never been ambitious except to earn my keep. I’m not naturally competitive. I’m ordinary, but definitely more fleshed out than Douthat has the capacity to describe. Don’t misinterpret that as criticism. It is not. I respect him and he’s not at all Kitchy.

Strangely enough, I’m not pessimistic because I’m reading Beowulf. 🙂

Via Meadia has me longing for Milton and scattered, excluded saints:

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

Cultural issues, which can be described as progressive or not depending on which side you’re on, have been useful tools in politics and business to divide and conquer. It helps win elections locally and sometimes more regionally and nationally, and it’s cheaper to implement “equality” and “diversity” than it is to share a higher percentage of profit with labor. Companies can be regressive with pay, transferring it directly to the investor class and essentially funneling money directly to those that would lobby their interests effectively, all the while appearing as “progressive”.

In other words, there is no “spiritual crises,” instead there are plutocratic economics and politics. Autonomy and individualism are not bad things. Neither is consumer choice, per se. What is bad is that rich folks have taken over the government, and have destroyed or weakened all the institutions that allowed other folks to have some of that autonomy, individualism and consumer choice too. UAW members used to own boats and even vacation houses in upstate Michigan. That was a good thing. Now, Mitt Romney owns seven houses and there are no real union workers. That’s a bad thing. I see that bad thing as a crises in economics and politics, not “spirituality.”

Gay marriage and racial and gender equality (and even good coffee, Google, and so on) are good things too. And we shouldn’t, and don’t, need to sacrifice them to get back to the minimum economic equality necessary for a healthy society.

The left celebrates the gains of workers. Workers are every color and age and gender. Workers ARE the left. We don’t read the New Yorker.

We have been unrepresented in Washington since NAFTA. Once unions were the great leveler. They made the capitalists share the bounty. The unions as we remember them will not be back but we will have a Labor Party.

The working class needs work and wages not war and welfare. D’s and R’s work to keep us divided so they can impoverish and enslave us in the service of their corporate masters.

When we can no longer feed our families we will take maters into our own hands. The New Yorker will be appalled.

“the automatic association of “inclusiveness” with equality is a fairly recent development in American thought, and reflects the triumph of the New Left rather than any inherent affinity”

Not so. When the Declaration said “all men are created equal,” it was saying that those men born in the North American colonies had a right to be included among the circle of those enjoying representative government.

The 14th amendment’s elevation of “due process” is all about inclusion.

“People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently. In this respect, the affirmations of choice and diversity that now characterize American culture, tend to undermine appeals to collective action or shared responsibility.”

This isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s also a little weasely–what counts as “very differently”? People of different ethnicities and even languages, as well as religions, united across those barriers back in the day to fight for the working class. Blackness, of course, was always the ultimate “other” that made white solidarity a possibility.

But nevertheless, we navigated immense diversity in the past to act collectively for numerous causes, and we can and do do so in the present.

Which brings us back to this: “a spiritual crisis of the BoBo elite, which is unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that its commitments to individual autonomy and expressive consumerism are incompatible with the egalitarianism that it pretends to favor.”

I grew up in a blue collar household with a Catholic-ghetto-refugee-Democrat-union member heading it, surrounded by the same, and I can tell you, they were the pioneers in consumerism and expressiveness.

Very well said!!! You need to expand this into a book. Seriously. It might be worth examining where this overlaps with Dan McCarthy’s recent writings on the connectedness of war and culture war. In particular, the question of how and why trade unionism and the social ethic it represented became so tied to Cold War liberalism and came to suffer so much because of it.

In my view, as I explore in my forthcoming history of the American Socialist Party, it was a result of the Second World War, and the events both leading up to it and in its aftermath, that made this so, in a pattern perhaps not dissimilar to that Dan examined with respect to Vietnam.

By the same token, just as any chance for the social democratic (or, if you will, small-r republican) ethic was destroyed by America’s rise as an empire, so now is the only conceivable scenario in which to revive that ethic a peaceable geographic break up of the United States.

Kind of agree, but still, I think there is a hidden assumption that less social inclusion leads to less economic inequality. And that is wrong. The author is biased, poverty is something inherent to any kind of human development and not only to progressive policy making. Just compare the state of the American society during the fiercest Conservative periods during the Cold War and you”ll see that social inequality was in skyrocket levels…

Capitalism is a highly adaptable system that seems to thrive on high unemployment – look at the company profits in the light of our recent unemployment. A large pool of potential employees is as valuable as a large pool of capital. It makes companies more fungible and productive. As companies seek more sources of labor, they adapt and co-opt ideas such as diversity, which has resulted in the integration of the underclass instead of the integration of the middle class.

Women, who once had a nice life with their children, have been pulled into the work force under the guise of feminism and have been used to undercut the living wage once earned by men.

The insecurity engendered by all of this causes people to support huge government expenditures to mitigate the social costs. The productivity of capitalism comes at a price. The unproductivity of socialism comes with another price.

“That Jim Crow laws are necessary to make good-paying blue collar jobs available to white workers?”

—I doubt that is his point. *My* point would be that affirmative action hurts the white working and middle class directly and does nothing for most blacks – it just creates an élite class of a few Blacks with privileges, coddled by the system. Most blacks are worse economically than in 1970.

” That gay marriage and handicapped parking spots are what is inhibiting wage growth?”

—Handicapped parking is a basic material support. Gay marriage is obviously a lifestyle obsession of Bobos and they would rather be friends with a gay billionaire than be seen at a demonstration for economic equality. If you disagree with gay marriage, you are ostracised by some – even though it is totally bizarre and anti-historical, while if you hate poor people, most modern leftists will at least talk to you.

” That it is all the fault of those selfish women who wanted to enter the professions instead of being full-time housewives?”

—Partly. That is a vicious cycle – big business wanted more labour supply to increase productivity and ease up the pressure on wages so they helped fund feminist propaganda in the 60s. However, once the trend takes off, eventually women who did not previously want to work are forced to, because wages have fallen. However, you have to celebrate this because it is a sacred right.

“But I don’t share your opinion that these things are incompatible.”

—His point was certainly that the emphasis of the New Left, and their more moderate social-liberal wing, was and is on culture, not on improving economic equality. Therefore, they are blind to the negative effects of the former on the latter. My point would be that socialism and liberalism are separate ideologies and you can believe in elements of both, but there is no semblance of real socialist-progressive ideology in the very bourgeois Democratic Party.

It’s nice to read kind words for the labor movement at TAC, but this is pretty shallow and ahistorical. That Meany made fun of SSM in 1972 means nothing (Obama opposed SSM in 2008!).

Why did the labor movement gradually become anti-racist, anti-sexist, and pro-immigration? It wasn’t because “the new left” forced them to. It was because of the economic logic of working class solidarity. They learned through the actual practice of organizing that white ethnic tribalism hurt the movement.

The oldest and leftest of the old left unions, after all, were the most anti-racist, anti-nationalist and anti-imperialist (eg the Wobblies).

Forty years ago comedian Dick Gregory posed this question: “White Man! White Man! Why do you need a n****r?” Today I think Gregory’s question applies more broadly. What kind of society would a truly egalitarian – socially, politically, economically – be like? Must every race have a winner and a loser? Does the herd exist if there isn’t a leader?Is there something in our makeup that insists someone be superior and someone else be inferior?

“the question of how and why trade unionism and the social ethic it represented became so tied to Cold War liberalism …”

There’s really not much question there. The tie is the fact that for the last 80 years, the plutocratic right has been hysterically screaming “Communism!!!” whenever the subject being discussed is unionism, or civil rights, or healthcare, or social security, or taxes, or the environment, or pretty much anything else they don’t like.

Thanks for the brilliant essay on the contradictions of the so-called “Left”…recall that the “New Left” was never a social force outside the College towns. Insulated and arrogant, they have matured into pure elitists.

It’s a problem I constantly encounter in any talk of a “Left-Right” coalition against war-mongering and the excesses of Wall Street. On one hand, I hold pretty conservative views on social issues, but very I define my views on political issues as “populist”—in the old sense of the term, focused on the excesses of Wall Street speculation. So I find that the so-called “lefties” are all hip to supporting abortion-on-demand, gay marriage, racial quotas, ignorance if not downright hatred of religion, etc. and even “globalization” and the “world economy”. But they are astoundingly ignorant of how the free market works, and how the system is being manipulated by the big bankers and the multinational corporations.

When you go over to visit the Tea Party, it’s all about “lowering taxes”. Mostly the Tea Party seems to be inspired by middle class and working class white resentment against on the onslaught of blacks and browns, and the privileges and benefits promised them by the “left”…

—-“That Jim Crow laws are necessary to make good-paying blue collar jobs available to white workers?”—I doubt that is his point. *My* point would be that affirmative action hurts the white working and middle class directly and does nothing for most blacks – it just creates an élite class of a few Blacks with privileges, coddled by the system. Most blacks are worse economically than in 1970.—–

We must remember that affirmative action was designed by the wealthy and the elite to pass the burden of racism and Jim Crow from themselves to the white working class (often referred to as the so-called “middle class and/or Nixon Silent Majority)…remember that George W. Bush could get into an Ivy League College with a C minus grade point average on a “Legacy” admissions, while pitting the grandson of a Slovak coal miner against the great-great grandson of a slave for the remaining slots.

And yes, most of the affirmative action slots at the Ivy League schools are going to blacks and browns whose parents were neither slaves nor white coal miners….and yes, blacks are still desperately behind whites in economic security.

This is an excellent piece and every liberal such as myself should regularly read the American Conservative if they want to understand, rather than parody, conservative social concerns and keep our heads out of the clouds. Between pieces like this, Noah Milliman’s recent pieces, etc., it makes me wish that we could have more real conversation like this and less “my team v your team” nonsense promoted by the major liberal and conservative opinion outlets that villify rather than understand the other side. There is a real balance to strike between social cohesion and victim-concern (and different types of victim concern, and the suffering that results when a critical mass of social cohesion goes missing) and it isn’t going to be any easier to get this the more everyone just accused everyone else of being mean or evil. Liberals like myself ignore these insights at our peril.

Since I can’t upvote the comments praising the article, I’ll formally echo the one that says it hits the nail on the head.

More generally, it is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth.

The above statement (which some of the critical commenters seem to have overlooked) goes to the root of the issue. We’ve had far too much redistribution of wealth for the purposes of mass vote-buying, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that even the legitimate functions of government imply redistribution, albeit on a vastly smaller scale.

A piece about the lack of serious attention paid to inequality with 29 comments, and nowhere therein will you find the merest mention of the word “Occupy.” You may think the Occupy movement was wrong-headed and ineffective, but it did put the issue of inequality front and center. And most of the people I talked to (in the admittedly more radical Occupy Oakland) did not think there was any incompatibility between economic justice and other social (read: identity- and diversity-based) issues. Far from it: they saw the struggles as inextricably linked.

Of course, the Occupy movement and the BoBo elite are not synonymous, so maybe that’s your out. I would certainly agree that the elite have turned a blind eye to economic inequality. (A redundant sentence if there ever was one.) The problem is that the elite aren’t the only people who care about issues of identity and diversity. Poorer folks often do, too (and sometimes in far more radical ways), but their concerns about inequality get ignored at the national level.

…Aaaand one more thing: this issue has already been debated on the left. Walter Benn Michaels made the supposed choice between diversity and economic equality something of a personal crusade a few years back, in a book and in articles in LRB and New Left Review. See the review by Alan Wolfe in Slate and, for more radical treatments, the critiques by Richard Seymour of the Lenin’s Tomb blog and by Louis Proyect.

Goldman’s general perception is valid. I’m not so sure about the “them” and “us” spin, or that you can break it down into simple dichotomies of racial inclusion versus economic equality or environmental consciousness versus social solidarity, though.

It’s more that the US chose an individualistic path rather than a collective or communitarian or solidaristic path. That path may involve individual economic advancement or consumerism or self-expression or hedonism. Build liberalism or progressivism on that basis and you get social or cultural or lifestyle liberalism, as opposed to, say, New Deal era economic liberalism. I don’t think that’s a stretch at all.

Whether the triumph of McGovernite social liberalism is really the central reason for the changes America has experienced is less clear. The whole country moved away from the community in misery of the Depression era or the “rising tide lifting all boats” of the postwar years. History would have been different if the left or liberalism hadn’t changed focus, but conservatives underwent their own transformations in the same period.

The background to this and to much of George Packer’s writing is that his grandfather, George Huddleston, was a liberal Democratic Congressman from Alabama in the Wilson-Roosevelt era, something Packer relates in his book “The Blood of the Liberals.” As a consequence, his perspective is a little different from that of many other liberals or other New Yorker writers. He’s aware that much of Middle America once was liberal or progressive and was lost to liberalism for decades. Just what Packer does with that consciousness or what it does to him may not please everyone, but he’s a more complex character than some other media opiners.

“Packer suggests that it does not, noting that social and economic equality progressed together for a while before diverging in the ’70s. But that divergence was not simply an accident. Rather, it was a predictable result of the takeover of Democratic Party by the New Left, which was far more interested in sexual and cultural revolution than in representing unfashionably conservative workers.”

It is an interesting thesis, but Goldman needs to explain why “workers” need necessarily to show hostility to greater equality for racial minorities, women, and homosexuals who want to marry or serve in the Armed Forces. And he also seems to assume without argument that a decline in this hostility leads to greater economic inequality.

I’ve been reading through this article for the past several days, and have been wondering how to react.

I grew up in a working-class city in Indiana where 1/4 to 1/3 of its adults worked for GM. The city had terrific schools, offered top medical care, and had abundant recreational opportunities. Looking back, I feel like I grew up in something of a working-class paradise. If I could turn back the clock and move home, I’d do it in a second. But it’s all pretty much gone today. There’s not a single GM employee left in the city. The park where I ran cross-country is overgrown in weeds, and only attracts drug dealers and philanderers. The pool where I swam lap after lap was drained of water in 2003, and will probably never be filled again.

Today, I live in Arlington, Virginia, which, if it is anything, is a hub for bourgeois bohemians. So, I feel like I’ve experienced first-hand what Goldman writes about.

But I’m not convinced that the diagnosis is accurate. My hometown consisted mainly of labor-oriented Democratic voters. Over time, these voters began to vote more and more heavily for the GOP. But this shift didn’t seem to be imposed externally. To the contrary, a lot of labor-oriented voters left the Democratic party willingly because they took their economic situation for granted, and started voting based on social issues rather than economic issues.

When the dust had settled from the 60s radicalism, we had two parties. One party represented a tenuous alliance between social liberals, minorities, and blue-collar workers. The other party represented a tenuous alliance between social conservatives, racial bigots, and pro-business folks.

This divide posed a difficult choice for blue-collar workers, whose economic interests were represented by the Democrats, but whose social interests were represented by the GOP. Bourgeois bohemians faced an analogous difficulty, as their economic interests were represented by the GOP, while the Democrats’ social platform was more consistent with their social libertarianism.

In the early 90s, two things happened. First, the bourgeois bohemians elected Bill Clinton, and largely moved into the Democratic party. And, in doing so, they forced the Democrats to make some reasonable accommodation for their pro-business interests. Second, blue-collar workers largely moved into the GOP, but never forced the GOP to make any accommodation for their pro-labor interests. They just cast themselves at the feet of pro-business social conservatives who were going to do nothing to stop the hollowing out of the middle class.

So, by the 2000s, we basically had two pro-business parties, one which is socially conservative, and another which is socially libertarian. But social conservatism can’t really thrive apart from functioning multi-generational communities. So, ultimately, pro-business policies have the effect of rigging the game in favor of social libertarianism. So, in the end, blue-collar voters got nothing in return for their allegiance to the GOP. They gave up the economic issues for free, and lost the social issues as pro-business policies gutted the traditional communities in which they lived. So, now, blue-collar voters are just mad at everyone, and have joined the Tea Party, I suppose.

While I admit to being more of a bourgeois bohemian, I believe that our country needs a pro-labor socially conservative political party, if only because we need a single party that represents both the social and economic interests of the middle class. But we’re not where we are today because the bourgeois bohemians destroyed the opportunity for the rise of such a party. To the contrary, we’re here because middle-class voters sold themselves to the GOP for a song at a time when they didn’t need to. And it’s hard to blame the bourgeois bohemians for that.

I would say that we BoBos probably don’t care as much about economic equality as you seem to suggest. I would say that BoBos are social libertarians, not social liberals. Our practices are generally socially conservative, but we are willing to accept minorities and gays as long as they are pleasant company at cocktail parties.

Social liberals, in contrast, are much more interested in specific policy goals, both economic and social. BoBos have fewer grand plans, and are more interested in carving out a comfortable existence. They would probably prefer economic equality, as that seems like a god thing. But they’re not going to do anything specific to achieve it.

I am currently reading “The Servant Economy” by Jeff Faux. He does a pretty good job of covering the decline and fall of the living wage in the US. He does not appear to have a Republican or Democrat political axe to grind and gives you the broad sweep.

“What if greater lifestyle choice and consumerism means more inequality?”

Of course greater lifestyle choice and consumerism means more inequality, when “greater lifestyle choice” and “consumerism” are code terms for “more inequality”. You guys invented the BoBos, and here’s why you did it: you wanted possession of a synthetic group whom you could then make the focus of a language of your own.

Well I think Goldman has a good response to Packer’s essay – thanks for it. And it’s interesting reading everyone’s comments.
Packer’s book is, in my opinion, well written and thought provoking. Worth a read. Not a solid crowding pen so you can step over the fence and wander a bit with the material he’s provided.
Maybe grab the mike again after you’ve had time to digest the book, Mr. Goldman.

Is anyone surprised? People crow that Obama cobbled together a center left coalition to win the 2012 election, but what were the 3 major who put him over the top, the Latino Vote, the Woman Vote and the indigent Black Vote. Of these three factions, who has as their first priority economic distributivism; which cares about the share of power between labor and management; which affirmatively promote unionism? My own understanding is none of them. Women voted for Obama mostly for promises to preserve “a woman’s right to choose,” many Latinos were lured with promises of immigration reform and the concomitant equality it supposedly brings, while many indigent blacks voted for Obama because Romney was alleged to have plans to end their government benefits. None of these people cared, one faction is content living on the benevolence of others, one is educated and probably has a government job, while the third is possibly undercutting private sector wages. As Bobby points out these BoBos only speak good words but they will not tolerate any inconvenience to themselves and they are unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in the current situation.

For anyone who is interested: there are repeats on Comedy Central of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The reason I’m bringing it up is that the former has Jon Stewart’s interview with George Packer, for any who are interested in seeing it. In my time zone (PDT), that’s 9 – 9:30 AM and 7:30 – 8 PM. The television discussion may be truncated, if so go to http://www.thedailyshow.com/ for the whole interview. The website may be the more convenient place to see it in any event.

It’s also worth noting that gay rights are not a purely boho concern, and it’s damn shame that they get portrayed as such. Lower income gays and lesbians (and trans and generally queer folks) of all races face serious employment discrimination and housing discrimination, not to mention street violence. Yes, there are flamboyant rich gay men that make good conversation at cocktail parties, but just as important are the low-income homosexuals who get kicked out of their apartment when the landlord hears they might’ve contracted AIDS. The former may be associated with manicured progressivism, but the latter will certainly take on déclassé populism just as readily. It’s not mere marital convenience on the table for some queer folks, it’s also about jobs, housing, and public safety. (And I’d argue economic parity goes hand in hand with egalitarianism in those cases)